A Walk in the Woods
Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail

Bill Bryson

New York: Broadway Books; ISBN: 0-7679-025201; Pages: 276.

Review © 2003 Branislav L. Slantchev

This is the book that made travelogues fashionable again. An unexpected best-seller (or maybe not that unexpected given Bryson's previous books), this funny story details the author's attempt to hike the full length of the famous Appalachian Trail that spans the American eastern seaboard from Maine to Georgia. The trail is over 2,100 miles long and every year about 2,000 hikers attempt it, and only about 10% succeed, earning the coveted title of "thru-hiker," also commonly known among the normal people as "total lunatic." Taking anywhere between several months and several years, the trail is hard and dangerous, spiritually and physically.

But this is not what Bryson's book is about, although he does talk about the hardships at length. It is a funny account of how he and a completely out-of-shape friend by name of Katz attempted to conquer the AT and instead discovered something intensely personal about America, its nature, its people, and its character. From stabs at the National Forest Service whose raison d'etat is not, as some would suppose, to guard the nation's forests but to build roads in them (pp. 46-7) and through tearful accounts of the devastation of nature along the trail, Bryson can make one as indignant as only an avowed tree-hugger could make a conscientious man feel. The macabre story about the underground fires in Pennsylvania and the people who choose to live on top of the smoldering trap is also fascinating. But so is the dark non-fictional account of the two girls murdered in their tent while the author was on the trail.

Still, and perhaps that explains his success, Bryson manages to avoid sounding either pathetic or sensationalist. Always the cheerful tone steals through, and Katz's trials and tribulations are guaranteed to get a laugh, whether he is hurling provisions in disgust at their weight only to discover that among themselves the two travel companions have almost nothing left to eat, or whether he is on the run from the gun-totting 450-pound jealous redneck husband of a woman he picked at the Laundromat. I re-read passages from the book now and then just because it is so well-written. The fun Bryson pokes at the couple that never even contemplated quitting the hike is refreshing because (a) it's so honest, and (b) they either lied through their teeth or were obviously loonies. I have yet to hike for more than 15 minutes without thinking that I don't really have to be doing it. Yet I do enjoy it enormously and so did Bryson, and it shows. An excellent book full with pithy observations, and not at all a stupid guide to the AT.

October 10, 2003